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Features and fitness tracking
- Can track loads of different exercises
- Also includes sleep and stress tracking
When it comes to fitness tracking, there’s a wealth of options available. Various workouts can be tracked via the Huawei Watch GT 2, such as running (indoor and outdoor), walking, elliptical, rowing (indoor and outdoor), cycling (indoor and outdoor), swimming (pool and open water), climbing, hiking, trail running, triathlon, and aerobics.
There’s also a personal intelligent sports coach to guide you through each exercise to make it better and safer. This system comes with an example workout made up of seven different phases. The digital assistant will talk to you through it and use voice prompts to tell you when to slow down and pick up the pace again.
When you've completed the seven phases, you get a summary of your data such as calories, fat burned, distance covered, and what muscles you've worked on.
The Huawei Watch GT 2 also tracks general daily activities such as calories burned, steps taken, and floors climbed, as well as sedentary alerts and heart rate. The floor monitoring was a bit odd, giving us weird results when it mistook an elevator ride for us climbing floors.
Heart rate tracking worked well though, and this also warns users by vibrating if their heart rate goes below or above the recommended level. Users can set the levels based on their doctor’s recommendation.
Huawei is seemingly trying to catch up with the Apple Watch 5’s ECG sensor, but the features here are nowhere near as advanced.
The Huawei Watch GT 2 also has a TruSleep 2.0 feature, which monitors your sleep, including how long you spend in light sleep, deep sleep and REM (rapid eye movement), as well as real-time tracking of your heart rate, pulse, and breathing quality.
The app then uses this data to analyze your sleep quality using artificial intelligence, and can make recommendations to improve your sleep quality.
There's also a TruRelax feature that records your heart rate variability, and provides all-day stress level monitoring. If it detects that you're getting stressed out, there's a breathing exercise to help you calm down, which is a nice touch.
Battery life
- Up to 14 days of life from 46mm model and 7 days from 42mm
- Actual lifespan is likely to be less, but still impressive
Huawei claims the 455mAh battery inside the 46mm Watch GT 2 gives two weeks of juice on a single full charge, while the 42mm model will apparently offer 7 days, but this all comes down to how you’re using it.
For example, when real-time heart rate monitoring is selected, the battery on our 46mm model dropped by around 12% by the end of the day, as opposed to just 7% when in smart heart rate monitoring mode.
If you are a moderate user you should be able to squeeze out around 10 days of battery life from this model, which is pretty decent. For fitness enthusiasts who work out close to two hours a day, the battery can last about 5 days, which is still impressive. This far surpasses offerings from both Samsung and Apple.
A full recharge from zero battery takes around 1 hour and 22 minutes, which isn't too bad either, though you need to use a proprietary charger.
Verdict
The Huawei Watch GT 2 offers a great value proposition with its internal and external hardware, and the fitness features are certainly quite impressive.
However, the software holds it back and needs to be fine-tuned further for Huawei to make a proper impression with future models. There needs to be more customization and there really, really needs to be more apps.
Who's this for?
With its focus on fitness and lack of apps, the Huawei Watch GT 2 is really for someone who primarily wants a fitness tracker, but one with the aesthetics of a high-end smartwatch.
Should you buy it?
If you’re in the market for a sleek-looking fitness tracker, then this is the one for you. For anything beyond that, it’s best you look elsewhere and find a more fleshed-out smartwatch, such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 or Apple Watch 5.
